Important Warning: Installation of this driver requires removing the restricted-modules package in order to work. That package includes drivers for madwifi (Atheros wireless cards), nvidia cards, and a handful of other devices. I provide a work-around for the madwifi drivers, but you need to perform it before removing the restricted modules (jump to end of this this post).

When running the dpkg-reconfigure command you should answer the questions that you know and take the defaults for the rest. You might want to say no to the monitor detection--it has caused X-Windows to crash for some people.

Note: If after reboot, your system hangs at a black screen before taking you to a graphical login - reboot to 'recovery mode' and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use 'vesa' instead of 'ati'. Then continue with the steps below.

Installing the new driver

This guide refers to the 32bit version of the driver. If you are using a x86_64 System you need the 64bit Installer. The installation procedure should be the same as for 32bit, except some filenames will differ slightly.

Change to the download directory. Make sure that you have the universe and multiverse repositories enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list before doing these steps. Sample sources.list.